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Daily Archives: June 29, 2011

“My drawings inspire and are not to be defined. They determine nothing. They place us, as does music, in the ambiguous world of the indeterminate. They are a kind of metaphor.”

Odilon Redon

JUNE 29, 2011. In other articles, I’ve mentioned the potential of new invented languages that don’t adhere to the familiar patterns of subject-object-verb.

For example, languages in which nouns display action characteristics as their prime feature, without the use of adjectives.

Let’s look at the language of psychiatry. It is reductionist. It takes a wide spread of behaviors and encapsulates them under “disorder” labels. “Clinical depression,” “ADHD,” “bipolar,” “oppositional defiance disorder.”

These labels are fictions. Well, why not? A language can be composed entirely of fictions. It’s an interesting idea. However, when these labels are used to make diagnoses that then lead to the administration of highly toxic drugs, that’s another story altogether.

And when the fictitious labels are sold as expert truth, this is also troubling.

But here I want to comment on the reductionist strategy itself. It is very old, and it has always served the same purpose: making complexity simple for simple minds.

People feel relieved to learn that their child’s unpredictable behaviors can be called ADHD. A label to hold on to in a storm. An anchor.

No further investigation is necessary. ADHD comes in and saves the day and answers the question Why.

Just as naming a messiah and indicating how he will bring salvation to the yearning masses is a welcome reduction of experience.

You can always sell reduction. Selling proliferation isn’t as easy.

Here is a VERY interesting example. “The group,” which one would think is more complex than “the individual,” is depicted as the fundamental unit of social and political concern. It is made into a simpler device, by assuming that we all share identical problems and impulses. Through this assumption, there is no longer any need to consider the individual in isolation, because he is merely a copy of the next individual, who in turn is a copy of the next individual, and so on. Reduction.

An empty slogan or generality is another strategy that allows simplification. For instance, Hope and Change. A moment’s calm reflection tells you you have no clue what is actually intended. However, you are invited to plug in your own hopes and your own preferred changes—and when millions of other people do the same thing, the slogan itself operates as a reduction…because in three words, it seems to summarize what everybody wants.

Sometimes, what looks like proliferation is actually reduction. Take the case of the DSM, which is the bible of the psychiatric profession. It lists all the fictional mental disorders which have been cooked up by professional committees. At present, there are 297. The number expands with each new edition of the DSM.

But the overriding message is this: “We are the experts. We can define what is wrong with the mind of any person. You can’t understand what we’re doing, because you aren’t a professional. So let us take over. We’ll simplify your questions and concerns and treat these disorders.”

In the same fashion, the mind-numbing canons and edicts, and the linguistic somersaults that define the cosmology of the Roman Church, conspire to present a clear message: “Let your priest be the judge. He will apply whatever piece of eternal truth is necessary to lead you into a better reality. He’ll boil it down for you.”

Reduction.

When we get into the area of imagination, we are really being taken for a ride, if we think this faculty is simple and straightforward. Nothing could be further from the truth. However, if people have dumbed themselves down to the point where they believe everything important should be reduced to a concentrate (add water and drink), they are barred from entrance. They are applying exactly the wrong standard to penetrate what, to them, has become a mystery.

You might consider this question: in order to serve the repressed need for complexity and variety, what strategy has become most popular in modern society?

The answer is: drugs.

Interesting, though, that after a certain threshold of continued use is crossed, the person finds himself in a gray area where his mind has been REDUCED.

Like this:

JUNE 28, 2011. Let us suppose we are standing at a table, and on the table is a machine. We have experts with us.

They turn on the machine, and they turn it off. They take it apart and examine and examine the pieces, and they put it back together again.

They say, “This machine is constructed in a very fine and complex way. We can see that. All the parts are coordinated and their functions interlock. The machine works. There is no doubt of that. But we have no idea what it produces.”

And as hard as they try, they come back to the same conclusion. They know it’s a machine. It works. It works very well. But they haven’t a clue about what it turns out, what it accomplishes.

So they turn on the machine and they leave the room.

The machine runs, without any interference, for ten years.

It’s obviously producing something, but no one knows what that is.

The output of the machine is invisible.

And suppose at some point ten years, 20 years down the line, it becomes apparent that the machine is changing reality. It is introducing new realities.

These new realities aren’t visible, but they are felt very strongly.

And one of the experts comes back to the room and looks at the machine and says, “I don’t know what you’re doing, but keep doing it, because you’re proving that reality can change at the most fundamental and profound level.”

The expert wasn’t sure such a change was possible. He believed something basic about reality was absolutely permanent. He was unhappy with that conclusion—but he had long ago accepted it. Now, though, he feels a rising hope. He was wrong.

He realizes that reality was indeed a series of boundaries. However it had been generated originally, that’s what it was.

And now it is disintegrating.

He feels great joy and anticipation.

Why should the former (and now evaporating) reality be permitted to last forever? Why were people disposed to accept that? What made them satisfied with that?

Finally, he feels his own hard dedication to the former reality slip away. No reason to maintain it.

Like this:

JUNE 28, 2011. When I gave my first two audio seminars on magic, (MIND CONTROL, MIND FREEDOM, and THE TRANSFORMATIONS), I realized I was describing exercises which, if done consistently, could allow people to experience the space-time continuum from a new perspective.

It was no longer necessary to think or assume the continuum was a given. It wasn’t necessary to surrender passively to the idea of an all-encompassing continuum.

The continuum is a kind of fantasy. A myth. It tells people who think they’re living inside a giant tin can what the shell is made of.

Subconsciously, people assume the continuum is WHATEVER THEY USE TO DEFINE THEIR FIELD OF OPERATIONS.

For example, suppose a person has an overriding problem he is constantly wrestling with. Every day, every week, he nudges and massages and moves that problem around. He pats it and kicks it and tries to push it and he seeks to move it out of the way. He denies it and accepts it and contemplates it and forgets it and remembers it and feels it…

Well, that problem is defining his field of operation…and subconsciously he thinks of it as the continuum.

To get outside that conception, the person needs to experience a new kind of action. A new kind of exercise, for example.

Here is another analogy. A runner runs around a track, day after day. He runs that quarter-mile and he does wind-sprints on it and slower intervals. He operates there on that track, that oval. And ultimately, he is trying to shorten the amount of time it takes to go around the track once.

TIME is his continuum. More specifically, the best time he’s ever registered in a race is his continuum, his boundary—and he wants to break through it.

But he keeps doing the same exercises over and over to achieve that breakthrough, and he reaches a limit where he thinks he’s hemmed in. He can’t go any faster.

He needs an exercise that will fundamentally alter his relationship to the continuum, to that idea of the “best time” he can muster.

In a way, life is like that. People do their best to get ahead—whatever that means to them. They do it from the point of view that they are in a space operating according to certain rules and restrictions.

They need two things. One, a new point of view. And two, exercises they do FROM that point of view.

So as I was giving those two seminars, I realized this was what I was providing. I had never seen it quite that way before.

The painter, Odilon Redon, once wrote, “Artists who approach perfection do not have many ideas.”

Translating that statement into my terms, it means: if you are operating within the continuum of your central myth, you will eventually reach a point where you are doing the best you can. You’re approaching perfection along that vector. But it’s not nearly enough…

Physics itself will reach this place of blockage, as long as it keeps looking at the same space-time continuum in the same old way. Atoms, electrons, quarks, waves, quantum entanglement, relativity—they will all have to go the way of an extinct species.

How we conceive of our own energy is a major piece of the puzzle. We tend to fall into habits, some of them barely noticeable. For instance, we view our energy as circulating within us or around us or coming in toward us.

What would happen if we shifted these notions of energy—and we had exercises to back up this shift and make it real and powerful?